ManuelMarulanda Vélez is the "nom de guerre" of Pedro Antonio Marin, the main leader of the FARC EP ("Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia - Ejercito del Pueblo").

Marulanda himself changed his political and ideological inclinations to the Colombian Communist Party (PCC) sometime during the period of "La Violencia" (roughly 1948 to 1958) that followed the assassination of the Liberal Party's leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan.

Marulanda eventually met and befriended Luis Morantes, also known as Jacobo Arenas, a PCC political cadre sent to the rural areas by the central party structure.

The Seventh Guerrilla Conference was a conference held by the Colombian FARC in 1982 under the guidance of Jacobo Arenas and ManuelMarulanda.

Many U.S. and other military experts argue that ManuelMarulanda Velez, as a veteran guerilla fighter and as an excellent commander for four decades, heads perhaps the most capable and dangerous Marxist guerilla organization in the world.

Marulanda is very often referred to as "Sureshot" ("Tirofijo"), because of a reputation for using firearms very accurately during his earlier years as an insurgent.

The FARC-EP is governed by a secretariat led by septuagenarian ManuelMarulanda Vélez (Pedro Antonio Marín), also known as "Tirofijo," and seven others, including senior military commander Jorge Briceño, also known as "Mono Jojoy." It is organized along military lines and includes several urban fronts.

Jacobo Arenas and ManuelMarulanda were two of the founders of the new guerrilla group and became its two top leaders.

Under the guidance of Jacobo Arenas and ManuelMarulanda, the Seventh Guerrilla Conference was a turning point in the FARC's struggle, as it provided them with the opportunity to finetune their policies and plans in order for them to build their desired socialist state in the future.

BOGOTA, Colombia -- ManuelMarulanda has lived the clandestine life of a guerrilla chieftain for so long that the last time he went to the movies was in the 1940s.

Marulanda has become legendary for his ability to "smell danger" and to escape when his troops are surrounded.

And in February, Manuel Perez, a 62-year-old Spanish-born priest who founded Colombia's second-largest rebel group, the National Liberation Army, succumbed to hepatitis B. Marulanda could take advantage of the FARC's military strength at the negotiating table, analysts say, by pushing for agrarian reform, a downsizing of the army and administrative control of several Colombian states.

Over 40 years, Marulanda, 76, turned a group of 48 armed farmers in southern Colombia into what was to become today's 17,000-strong FARC, which has fought the government and right-wing paramilitaries in a civil war that has claimed more than 200,000 lives.

Marulanda, known by his nom de guerre "Tiro Fijo" ("Sure Shot"), was born in Genova, a coffee growing town in the western province of Quindio.

Marulanda hid in Quindio's mountains along with 14 cousins and farmers opposing Colombia's conservative government and later embraced the Marxist doctrine after being approached by Colombia's Communist Party.

In January, 2000, ManuelMarulanda, head of the guerilla movement of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, Marxist), accused the Colombian press barons of being "at the service of the big monopolies" and promised to make them "pay their debt" to his organisation.

The groups under ManuelMarulanda, nicknamed "Tirofijo" ("Bulls-eye") and Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista, head of the National Liberation Army (ELN, Guevarist) since 1998, have on several occasions stated that they consider the journalists "who defend the army's activities" as "military targets".

www.rsf.org /rsf/uk/Predateurs/html/marulanda.html (176 words)

The Consortium(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)

Yet, as the political-military crisis grows in Colombia, ManuelMarulanda Velez may become the unlikely leader -- or at least the personal symbol -- of the first leftist guerrilla movement to achieve success in the post-Cold War era.

At the political epicenter of these fears is the surprising figure of Marulanda, who has been fighting the Colombian government for 50 years and founded the FARC 35 years ago.

To this day, Marulanda -- often known as "Tirofijo" for "sharp shot" -- is regarded as the supreme leader of the FARC, approving all major decisions.

Marulanda, known as “Sure-Shot,” who has been underground for more than four decades, did not attend a meeting with Pastrana scheduled for Jan. 7 in San Vicente del Caguán to kick off preliminary peace talks between the government and the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Most analysts reject the FARC claim that Marulanda did not attend because of a lack of security, saying the FARC could have provided security, since San Vicente del Caguán is under their control.

Marulanda, who has said he would negotiate a swap in person, is scheduled to meet with government representatives.

The FARC continues to cite government controls on the demilitarized zone as the chief obstacle to progress in the talks and to the guerrillas' compliance with the October 2001 "San Francisco de la Sombra" accord.

FARC leader ManuelMarulanda orders his negotiators to stay away from talks with the Colombian government until the military ceases overflights and alleged inflitration of the FARC demilitarized zone.

Marulanda voices optimism, stating that the talks are near the point at which substantive negotiations, following the twelve-point agenda agreed on May 6, 1999, may begin.

The president was so satisfied with the outcome of his meeting with ManuelMarulanda, commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, that he granted a nine-month extension of a large safe haven he has allowed the rebels to occupy in southern Colombia since 1998.

It responded to a missive from Marulanda that the government received over the weekend, in which the rebel chieftain proposed swapping 245 security force members held captive by the FARC for an unspecified number of rebels held in Colombian prisons.

Marulanda, whose real name is Pedro Antonio Marin, insisted that the exchange take place before peace talks get under way.

Ricardo reiterated those commitments in his letter to Marulanda and said the government had a "sincere intention" of carrying the peace process forward.

www.cnn.com /WORLD/americas/9809/30/colombia.peace (554 words)

Rebels make peace gestures in Colombia(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)

In letters made public Thursday, ManuelMarulanda, a rebel commander, and leaders of two other leftist guerrilla groups all expressed a willingness to hold some form of peace talks aimed at ending more than 30 years of armed conflict.

The olive branches held out by Marulanda and leaders of the smaller National Liberation and Popular Liberation armies were apparently prompted by the government's decision, announced Wednesday, to permit so-called "regional dialogues" between local government officials and guerrilla leaders in the country's 33 provinces.

In the aftermath of the Pasto talks, a radio network reported that Marulanda, the 69-year-old commander of Latin America's strongest guerrilla movement, proposed formal peace talks in a letter to former foreign minister Augusto Ramirez Ocampo, head of a government peace commission.

Pastrana invited ManuelMarulanda, founder and chief of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to meet him by Sunday, the new deadline for deciding the future of the guerrilla enclave where the negotiations have been headquartered.

``Marulanda has said he is ready to work 24 hours (a day) for peace,'' Pastrana told a national radio and television audience.

The president proposed he and Marulanda discuss a wide range of issues, including possible prisoner exchanges and measures to restore flagging public confidence in the talks.

Marulanda was a peasant farmer before taking to the hills to lead his guerrilla group.

The 46-year old center-right president forced his third meeting with the veteran guerrilla when, last week, he demanded a face-to-face encounter as a condition for allowing the rebels to keep control of their Switzerland-sized enclave.

Marulanda wants to talk about attacks by paramilitary death squads and Pastrana's ``Plan Colombia'' anti-cocaine offensive, which is backed by $1 billion in U.S. military aid.

During a hard-line military dictatorship, dissident members of the Liberal and Communist parties left mainstream politics to establish their own communist and agrarian "independent republics." The largest cooperative, which had 1,000 members, was located in Marquetalia, a rural municipality high in the Andean plains.

According to FARC lore, it was led by an 18-year old peasant named ManuelMarulanda.

Marulanda's lifelong friend and second-in-command, Jacobo Arenas, considered the FARC's political founder, envisioned an agrarian and communist state with small-sized industries.

ManuelMarulanda, center, commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and guerrilla fighters walk towards the first international public hearings on the eradication of illegal crops in San Vincente del Caguan, southern Colombia, Thursday, June 29, 2000.

Back then the aim of his struggle was to survive, and the only way to ensure that his life and that of 50 of his comrades were safe was to take arms.

In the 60's and the 70's his guerrilla group gained popularity thanks to the expansion of Communism in the Caribbean and a new ideology known as Marxism, whose main predicate was class struggle.

Marin would later take the name of a labor leader whom government agents beat to death  ManuelMarulanda  and build the FARC, which he cofounded in 1964, from a scraggly hit-and-run communist band into a potent force that by the mid-1990s was overrunning government military outposts.

A taciturn farmer's son with a sixth-grade education, Marulanda was a self-taught master military strategist.

I met a number of FARC leaders after Andres Pastrana, elected president in 1998 on a peace platform, ceded a Switzerland-sized swath of southern Colombia as a free zone, to the insurgency as a condition for beginning talks to end a conflict that over the years has alternately simmered and flared.

In their third face-to-face encounter, Pastrana is trying to get Marulanda's Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to return to formal peace talks that they abandoned in November.

Marulanda, for his part, is demanding that Pastrana crack down on a right-wing paramilitary group that has been massacring suspected rebel sympathizers, and to scale back an anti-drug offensive backed by $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid.

Marulanda also put a positive spin on Thursday's talks, details of which were not released.